Carlo Piana is legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation Europe. On June, 9 he will be in Trento, at the Economics Faculty, to talk about the aftermath of the Microsoft Court of First Instance's decision, and in particular about its relevance for the open source movement (Presentation, in Italian)

Counter to a bill currently before the US Congress, foreseeing an excuse for copyright infringers from significant damages if they can prove that they made a "diligent effort" to find the copyright owner, Lawrence Lessig suggests in an article published in the New York Times that:- the copyright owner, after a 14-year period, should be required to register a work with an approved, privately managed and competitive registry and pay $1- this rule should not apply to foreign works, or to work created between 1978 and today- photographs and other difficult-to-register works should be subject to this rule depending on the technology available, both to develop simple registration databases and to make research handy and reliable.

A district court in Munich (Landgericht München I)ruled in July 2007 that Skype had violated the GNU General Public Licence 2.0 because it had sold a SMC Networks Linux-based VoIP telephone (WSKP100) without providing both the copy of the license and the source code of the software. In particular, together with the product, there was only a leaflet pointing to an URL where the text of the license and "information on obtaining access to the GPL Code" could have been obtained, whereas according to art. 1 GPL v. 2.0, the licensee is required to "give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this Licensealong with the Program". Moreover, art.3, par.1 together with par.3, requires the licensee to accompany the program/product either with the "complete corresponding machine-readablesource code" or to offer access to copy the source code from a designated place, provided in the latter case that distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from the same place. Therefore, only if the binary had been made available in Internet for download, which was not the case, the offer to download the source code would have been in compliance with the GPL terms.One of the appeal judges is cited to have said, as reported by Harald Welte's blog "if a publisher wants to publish a book of an author that wants his book only to be published in a green envelope, then that might seem odd to you, but still you will have to do it as long as you want to publish the book and have no other agreement in place". Skype's legal counsel thought it wise to withdraw the appeal.Comment on the district court decision: Jörg Wimmers and Detlef Klett, Computer und Recht 2008, p. 59.

Are the results provided by stock market event studies potentially delivering useful evidence to competition authorities? Probably not, according to a Paper published on the UK Competition Commission website.